


To the Mattresses

by SegaBarrett



Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28706508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Maria's not happy about her father owing the Corleones a favor, and she decides to repay it. It doesn't go quite as planned.
Relationships: Maria Bonasera/Sonny Corleone
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	To the Mattresses

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own The Godfather, and I make no money from this.

Maria Bonasera would have been lying if she said she had driven back to New York from Boston with any sort of a plan.

When her father had admitted, at last, exactly how the two boys who had tried to… well, she wasn’t going to think about that part because it never went anywhere good… how the two boys had each ended up in the hospital and become the talk of the school. 

How now, people seemed to regard the name Bonasera in a whole new way in their little close-knit community.

How he owed the Don a favor.

The fear in his voice when he had admitted that had been what had spurred her into action.

While Carmela Corleone was her godmother, Maria didn’t know the family very well. The only one she could remember was the eldest son, Sonny, who she had briefly encountered when she had finally gotten out of the hospital, but before she had left for Boston.

He had stopped by the house. Sonny was huge, overwhelming, mammoth and heading towards her. Maria’s father had seized up, his hands on her shoulders, as if to protect her.

But Sonny had smiled and offered his hand to shake and hadn’t commented on her scarred face at all, which was… nice. She had reached out and touched his palm and tried to find some words, but hadn’t needed to as Sonny launched into the fact that his father had sent him by to check on Maria and see if she was all right, and if there was anything they could do…

Maria’s father had said no, nothing, they had already done so much.

That night, Maria’s friend Samantha yammered on the phone to her when she told her the news: “Oh, Sonny Corleone? Was in your house? Oh my gosh, Maria, you won’t believe the things that they say about him. They say he has a huge… I mean, can’t say I have seen it myself or anything but… oh by the way, did you hear about Kevin and Jerry? They’re in the hospital. Somebody beat them up, oh my gosh. Didn’t you used to go out with Kevin?”

She had left for Boston that very night.

***

This had been the worst of bad ideas, Maria thought to herself as she pulled up on the deserted Jones Beach Causeway. She had only started driving this year and was not very confident, and she had opted for the road with the least amount of traffic to avoid careening into an accident she couldn’t afford to pay for.

Only one of the tollbooths seemed to be open on either side, but there weren’t any other cars on the Causeway either. 

When she placed the crumpled-up dollar to the toll-taker and waited for her change, the man leaned forward a little and blinked at her.

“What happened to your face?” he inquired. 

“Boxing,” Maria said dryly. “Knockout in the fourth round.”

“You or him?” the guy asked.

“Both.” 

That was when she caught it. 

There were too many shadows. Across the lane at the tollbooth going the opposite direction, there seemed to be enough shadows to swallow the tollbooth whole, somehow.

There was no way that there were this many people working there when there was no one actually driving down the road as far as she could see. What were they doing there? If they were friends or associates of the sole toll collector, then why would they be so far out of view? After all, there was no one to complain about them goofing off together on the job.

No, there was definitely something ominous about the number of people hunched down by the tollbooth, but Maria knew better than to say anything. She knew the cost of calling men out for their evil plans. Instead, she forced her face into a smile as the man handed her back her changed, leered at her, and then opened the gate.

She drove slowly, haphazardly, wondering who to tell about this, if indeed there was anyone to tell at all.

Later, she would say that it was only by pure chance that she looked across the divide and noticed, as the only car going the other way on the lonely road, a black car that she recognized as that of Sonny Corleone.

She rolled down the window and leaned out, yelling his name. The sound of the wind against the car, however, drowned her out, and the driver of Sonny’s car – it had to be Sonny himself, Maria was sure of it. 

And he was moving closer and closer to the doomed tollbooth, just as Maria was moving closer and closer to passing him on the highway unless she stopped.

In a surge of desperation, she jerked the wheel all the way to the right, and then she shut her eyes, not wanting to predict the impact. 

There was a crunch of metal and when Maria finally opened her eyes, she yelled in her mind, “Way to go, Maria! You’ve killed him and you both.”

But then the mangled door flew open and Sonny Corleone, bruised and beaten but very much alive, sprinted out and ran over, yelling, “What the hell was that?”

Maria fumbled for her own door and got it open, tumbling out and falling to the ground.

Sonny yelled again, “You tried to kill me!”

She sucked in a breath and managed to yell back, “They were trying to kill you! There’s…” She began to crawl towards him. “Uh, men at the… tollbooth… with guns…”

Sonny stopped in his march towards Maria, and she heard him curse quietly.

“Shit… I should have seen it coming.” Then he paused. “Hey, you’re that girl… the undertaker’s daughter. We met before.”

***

_“Listen,” Sonny instructed, “The next time you find yourself in a situation like that – and you will, cause men are dogs, it’s not so much about fighting back as fighting back with the minimum amount of effort. Don’t exhaust yourself – make ‘em exhaust themselves.”_

_“Like how?” Maria asked._

_“Don’t fight fair. Kick ‘em between the legs and run. Or go for the nose – it bleeds a lot, so it’ll probably freak out cowards like this.”_

_Maria looked up at him sadly._

_“Where were you before this happened?” she asked._

_“Nobody can change the past,” he replied. “So don’t think about it. Here, give me a jab.”_

_“I don’t wanna hurt you, though.”_

_“Trust me,” Sonny said and chuckled, “You won’t. I’ve got a hard head.”_

***

“Yeah,” Maria mumbled.

Sonny crouched down and offered his hand. She accepted it and found herself pulled up in one swift yank.

And then, what sounded like firecrackers going off around them. 

She yelped, and Sonny pulled her around the back of the cars.

“We need to get out of here. Sounds like they’re taking their show on the road,” Sonny grumbled. He looked back and forth between the two cars, and Maria began to second guess her plan all over again. Had she destroyed their only chance of getting away with their lives when she crashed both the cars?

Maria heard the sound of an approaching car in the distance. Her legs were burning and felt like rubber and static, but she ran in the direction of the car and stood in front of it, shutting her eyes and hoping that whoever was driving wasn’t going to just run her over (her faith in people had been decidedly zero since her run-in with Kevin and Jerry). 

The car shrieked to a stop and the man who was driving, a tall black fellow wearing a gray hat, stuck his head out.

“Get out of the way!” he yelled first, then paused, “What happened?”

“We need to get out of here!” Maria declared, “Give us a ride?”

The man sighed and said, “Get in the back.” Maria climbed in the back, followed by Sonny. 

The sound of gunfire up ahead, coming from the tollbooth, compelled the driver to cross over to the other lane and go back the other way.

“What in God’s name is going on back there?” the driver asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Sonny replied. The driver looked into the mirror and, upon seeing Sonny’s face, swallowed. 

“This isn’t some Bonnie and Clyde stuff, is it?” the driver asked warily. “I have four kids and I need…”

“You’re fine,” Sonny replied, “We just need a ride.”

***

When the man pulled up in front of the Corleone compound, Maria gave Sonny a pointed look until he gave the driver a crispy twenty-dollar bill. They both hopped out and Maria gave the man a wave as he drove off, probably hoping that it would be the first and last time he would find himself involved in a Corleone family showdown.

Maria couldn’t say that she blamed him, though first and foremost on her mind was still making sure that she had sufficiently repaid the favor her father had required of Don Corleone. Maybe saving his son was enough but, then again, maybe it wasn’t?

Sonny turned and looked at her, and then started to walk into the house with her hot on his heels. She guessed that this was where she should be – she wondered if she had made herself a target, now – would she always have to look over her shoulder to see if whoever had tried to kill Sonny would take her out too for getting in the way? Maybe it would be one day when she was living up in Boston, sitting in a chair and watching the sunset. She’d never see it coming.

That thought made her pick up the pace and follow Sonny even closer.

“It was a trap,” Sonny announced as he walked in. A tall man with blonde hair rose and ran at him, hugging him tightly before seeing Maria and giving a questioning look. “Tom, this is Maria Bonasera. The undertaker’s daughter. Mama’s goddaughter, you know.”

Maria sometimes forgot that this was true, as she saw the whole Corleone family so infrequently. The idea of a woman who she barely know being ordained by God to look over her was a thought that set her a little off-kilter, as if the whole day hadn’t already.

“Yes, I know who she is, Sonny. But the question is… well, why exactly is she here in this house?”

“Don’t play Pop with me, Tom. She actually spotted the trap and, well, my car’s totaled now. We had to hitch a ride back. So I brought her back.”

Tom raised an eyebrow.

“For what purpose?”

“Safety,” Sonny suggested. 

“I’m sure you’ll keep her quite safe,” Tom said dryly, “Get yourselves patched up and then dinner’s going to be on the table at six.”

Sonny made his way up the steps, and Maria, not knowing what else to do, followed him. She hadn’t been a fan of Tom’s tone and wondered back at the initial thought that she had had in the back of her mind when she had originally planned to come offer to return the favor her father had beckoned from the Corleones.

She shivered and called out, before he could hit the bathroom, “Sonny?”

He turned back, looking as if he had temporarily forgotten that she was there at all.

“I’m going to have one of my men bring you home right away,” he said.

“Before you do,” Maria blurted. “The reason that I came down from Boston was because my father owes a debt to your family, and…”

“Well, I would say that you’ve definitely repaid it a few times over,” Sonny said, “Though if we could do it all over again, I’d hope we could spare the Continental. It was a fine car.”

“Well, um,” Maria shifted in her spot, “When I came down, that wasn’t what I was planning to offer you.”

Sonny cocked his head to the side, then took a step forward.

“Maria… The fact that you’re shaking even talking about this means that what you were planning to offer, you aren’t ready to give.”

She looked down and shuffled.

“I got this,” she said, gesturing to the scar across her face, “trying to hang on to this. And now it’s for nothing. It’s not like I’m ever getting married, looking like this.”

Sonny leaned against the door.

“And you’d like me to take that pressure off of you?” he asked.

Maria thought about it a moment, then nodded again.

“I’m just tired, Sonny.” It was the first time that she had said his name, and it felt odd in her mouth. 

Sonny nodded, slowly, and looked her up and down.

“It’s a tempting offer,” he said. “But now that I’ve got at least a few more days to live, I hope that you’ll keep it open. I have to go figure out what to do about my brother-in-law, who tried to poke me full of holes. And then I need to figure out some other things. And so do you.” He dragged a hand down over his face. “I’ve also been told I may not be one to start with, just due to… well, ask around in town and they’ll tell you all about it. But when you’ve had some time to think it over, well, I’ll give you a number to call. And that’ll be the favor I owe you for saving my life.”

Maria broke out into a sweat and leaned against the wall with exhaustion. 

“And then what?” she asked.

Sonny grinned.

“Then we go to the mattresses in a whole new way.” He pat her gently on the back. “I look forward to it.”

**The End**


End file.
